That Was the Wiki That Was

[Lissa]

With search bars in all major browsers and widgets for every desktop, Wikipedia is the site you can look to for answers without having to go there first. Tish to the naysayers who slag off Wikipedia - what have you been looking up on a whim today? And what nuggets of fascination did you discover?

Why do we have DVD-R and DVD+R?

It turns out the -R wasn't meant as "minus R" but simply meant recordable as in CD-R. The +R format was an improvement which was developed about five years later. Hence some earlier machines can't handle the tweaked format.

Is Peter Serafinowicz really six foot nine?

Wiki had nothing about his height. The ADBS tease would turn out to be a conceit.

Plus lots about running virtual machines on a Mac and the history of OSX in general.

So what have you been doing?

[Pip Madeley]

Today I looked up the Wiki entry for Doctor Who and The Savages to make sure I was right about Planet Of Evil guest stars Ewen Solon and Freddie Jaeger both appearing in it.

[Captain Tancredi]

Darts (having overheard a conversation in a pub about the Yorkshire Dartboard) and dry cleaning.

[cullsoft]

I'm forever looking up radio stars and comedians when I hear them on BBC7 and Radio 4... mainly so I can find out a bit of background, see if there's anything else they've done that I recognise, and to see what they look like.

The other day I found out from there that the delightful Charlotte Green is only in her late 40's, and although Wikipedia didn't have the photo itself, it did provide a link to somewhere that showed me what she really looked like - I never imagined her as a blonde before then!

[Rob McCow]

I discovered how to spell Kenny Everett, and also that his glamorous female film star character, named Cupid Stunt, was originally going to be called Mary Hinge, but that the latter name was deemed too rude. Cupid, of course, was perfectly acceptable.

[Paul Monk]

Cupid Stunt is a Spoonerism that's far ruder than Mary Hinge!

[Lissa]

Who knew? Australia once sold a "Mars Lava" bar - an ORANGE MARS BAR~! That either sounds very good or very bad. Wiki didn't say which it was.

[Captain Tancredi]

If they ever bring out the Vodka Cranberry Magnum here, that's good too.

The name Mary Hinge was (I was once informed by a colleague, who had a copy of the Racing Post article) once given to a racehorse- there are a few names which have been used by British horse owners racing in America, where the significance of the name isn't appreciated.

[Andrew Curnow]

When I got to work this morning, the Wiki page for (Bruce Willis film) The Last Boy Scout was up on the screen. That's odd, I thought.

[Jeff]

Lately I have been looking up info on various AMD and Intel processors, as well as various motherboards and motherboard chipsets and that sort of thing. My mobo and video card died a couple weeks ago and I have had to revert to my old 600 Mhz PIII and 3dfx Voodoo 3 card, so I am seriously thinking about a low cost upgrade that I can build on in the future. A Biostar T-Force mobo and a Sempron 'Sparta' processor for now, with possibley an Athlon 64 FX-62 upgrade later on down the road is the idea I'm entertaining now, though I might consider getting one of the 65nm Brisbanes permanently instead...

[Ralph]

I find Wiki a really handy site for checking out all sorts although I am aware that you can adjust it easily!

[Alex]

I was looking up Dan Dare on wiki to see what they made of Grant Morrison's take on the character, when I found this interesting little snippet:

Captain Jack Harkness, the Doctor Who and Torchwood character has several similarities to Dan Dare. The script for the episode The Empty Child in which he makes his first appearance describes him as having "the jawline of Dan Dare, the smile of a b**tard"

[Rob McCow]

Today I found out about the Noble Incitatus.

Incitatus was the name of Roman emperor Caligula's favored horse. Some have indicated that the horse was attended to by eighteen servants, and was fed oats mixed with gold flake; according to Suetonius's Lives of the Twelve Caesars, Incitatus had a stable of marble, with an ivory manger, purple blankets and a collar of precious stones. Suetonius wrote also that Caligula planned to make Incitatus a consul. Caligula even procured him a wife, a mare named Penelope. It has also been said Caligula claimed his horse to be a 'combination of all the gods' and to be worshiped as such.

The horse would also "invite" dignitaries to dine with him, and had a house with full complement of servants to entertain such guests.

'His life's opened up so much since I made him a Senator.'

[Rob McCow]

Intermammary sulcus or intermammary cleft are the terms adopted by the International Federation of Associations of Anatomists (IFAA) for the area of cleavage between the breasts not including the breasts.

Now we know.

[Andrew Curnow]

Call me old-fashioned, but I think 'cleavage' is a lot catchier.

[Stephen Morgan]

Cupid Stunt is a Spoonerism that's far ruder than Mary Hinge!

But it was all done in the best possible taste!

[shada pavlova]

I clicked "Random Page" on Wikipedia and came up with:

Grant Izzard (born in Penrith, New South Wales) was an Australian rugby league player for the Penrith Panthers and the Illawarra Steelers in the New South Wales Rugby League competition in Australia. His position of choice was at centre and he is also the younger brother of rugby league player Craig Izzard.

Izzard was a Penrith local junior who followed in the footsteps of his older brother but lack of opportunity at his home club meant that he was forced to move on eventually signing with the Illawarra Steelers in 1993. The beginning of a new season at his new club looked promising until he was cited for biting an opposition player and was subsequently suspended and failed to regain his form or position in the first grade side.

I assume you've heard of the Doctor Who-only Wikipedia? Well, I clicked "Random Page" on that and it came up with:

The end of the Universe, known to the Time Lords as "Event Two", is an event that is to take place far off into the future where the universe, or N-Space, will collapse in on itself due to two factors: the fact that the universe is a closed system; and the constant build up of entropy.

The end of the Universe has been projected to occur in varied times, including the years 60,000,000,000 AD (BFA: Zagreus), 100,000,000,000,000 AD (DW: Utopia) and 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 AD. (PDA: The Infinity Doctors)

Before 1981, the universe had already past the point of collapse. Having discovered this, the Logopolitans created Charged Vacuum Emboitments which opened N-Space into another universe, E-Space, allowing entropy into E-Space. Though Logopolis was destroyed in 1981, the CVEs were rebooted and still continue to feed entropy from our universe into E-Space. (DW: Logopolis)

[WhiteCrow]

Today I have mainly been reading about Werner von Braun, V2s and Mittelwerk slave labour for research for a story - gonna be a bundle of laughs.

Oh and about Rorkes Drift as we've been watching Zulu.

[Lissa]

My sidekick woke up on Sunday morning after a drunken night of revelry in Cambridge and found he suddenly knew the location of every modern Olympic Games. I've been using Wiki to test him and he's spot on so far. The only one he couldn't remember was 1906 (the Games erased from history by the IOC) but I'll forgive him because he's thinking about getting an iPhone and so can't be all bad.

[Zbigniev Hamson]

The end of the Universe, known to the Time Lords as "Event Two", is an event that is to take place far off into the future where the universe, or N-Space, will collapse in on itself due to two factors: the fact that the universe is a closed system; and the constant build up of entropy.

Bloody hell, that's one uneventful universe.